Renowned artist Rory McGrory wakes up trapped in a mysterious art gallery surrounded by empty canvas’s. No art. No answers. And no way out—until he’s greeted by his ex-wife Pippa, who also happens to be dead.
She’s determined to convince him that he is, too—and that the artless frames are, in fact, his life’s retrospective. But why can’t he see his own work? As Rory ricochets between denial and acceptance, he’s forced to confront his unresolved past and the emotional toll of a life half-seen. Is this strange afterlife gallery a purgatory—or his final chance to see his life clearly?
“Retrospective” at the Barons Court Theatre marks the UK premiere of the play following its world premiere at the 2025 Broadway Bound Theatre Festival in New York.
We caught up with actress Jasmine Dorothy Haefner to learn more about the play.
What can you tell me about Retrospective and your role within the show?
Retrospective is a play about a lifelong, famous painter who dies and is forced to talk to every person he ever hated, while in the liminal space of the afterlife. I play Z, the art critic who spent her entire career haranguing the main character with her slam reviews of his art. She is quick-witted, intelligent and impassioned. Some would call her mean, but I would just call her… smart. The show asks us to look at what these characters are really stuck on that is keeping them from moving to whatever is next, and the main thing my character struggles with is her relationship to power and happiness.
The play deals heavily with empty canvases and a life half-seen. As an actor, how do you react to and interact with a stage filled with literal and metaphorical blank space?
I’ll be honest, it isn’t the easiest situation to work with such a minimal set, especially in a show where there’s no props, so all the characters have to use is literally their bodies (which can’t touch) and voices. It sounds simple, but it actually is incredibly difficult. It is often these “extras” of the environment around us as people that make us feel comfortable, and the same is true on stage. However, with amorphous staging becoming more and more common in the theatre space now, even in big-budget productions, it is excellent practice! As an artist, every new show presents different challenges, and it's exciting to look at it from the perspective of “what tool in my kit do I get to really sharpen my use of this go around?” In Retrospective, it is a true flex of the imagination, generating the bright white, liminal space that extends into the abyss around us, and creating a comfortability of the body in what is literally meant to almost be a “no-space,” while looking at white canvases that, to my character, are supposed to be some of the ugliest things I’ve ever had to stare it. This is the actor's trick, and I have fun practicing it.
As a New York-based comedic actress and writer, have you noticed a difference in how American vs. British audiences lock into the dark, existential humor of Retrospective?
Yes! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you’ve asked this! Because I’m acting and not directing, I can only fully explain it from the audience’s perception of my character, as opposed to the entire play, but that has been a BIG difference! After the first two shows, I was told I was doing great (by our director, playwright, audiences who were seeing it for the first time, ones who were seeing it fresh, everyone), but I just… couldn’t… kick… this feeling that our British audiences here were sort of… put off by my portrayal of Z. I could tell they had a kind of… reproach to her viciousness and vengeance. I could FEEEEEL it whilst performing, and it was killing me. This character who, sure she’s cruel-tongued and mean-spirited but I, I love her and I needed the audience to at least have empathy for her. Otherwise her journey has no payoff!
So, I spoke with Noah Huntley, our lead actor who’s spent time in both the U.K. and the U.S., about how the two cultures approach “meanness” and he and I devised a plan to take some of the acidity out of the character, to start her “nicer” in the play, to have her place greater focus on when the main character’s ego is on full display, and more than anything, to take some of the intense emotional charge out of her lines and instead rely on the beautifully cutting writing by T.J. Elliott. In this way, I made the character a bit more palatable for the British audiences, who are more culturally used to a sort of biting intelligence and sharpness used to cut someone down, as opposed to the American explosive emotionality that is more familiar across the pond.
We’re all thinking the same thing, but here it’s about the words you're using, and perhaps the pace of how you say them, in the States, it’s about the emotion you throw into it, so I’ve had to adjust!
Because you are a writer yourself, does that change how you dissect a script as an actor? Did you find yourself looking at the structure of Retrospective through a writer's lens during prep?
I definitely cannot take the lens of the writer away from my work, no matter what I’m doing, because the story is where it all starts. However, my skill as a writer really plays out, not in re-writing someone else’s script, but in asking myself what this writer is trying to accomplish, and asking, as my teacher Giles Foreman pounded into us over and over again, “What is this story about, politically, socially or philosophically?” and then “How does your character’s arc help tell that story?” When you work in this way as an actor, you start to develop a keen sense for writing, even if it’s not a form you practice.
I’ll also note that I am in SUCH a privileged position as an actor on this production because, not only have T.J. Elliott and I worked together on three of his scripts now, and he is genuinely such a generous collaborative partner, but the character of Z was specifically written for me to perform. That being said, I have consulted on this script since T.J. sent it to me in November, 2024. It’s so important as an actor that you’re helping someone else’s vision become a reality, not just your own, so in most situations as an actor, I tread lightly with feedback to writers.
However, on Retrospective I’m genuinely so lucky to be working with a writer who has let me use my writer brain as well.
Death and purgatory are classic comedic tropes, from Beetlejuice to The Good Place. What do you think makes the afterlife such a fertile ground for comedy, and what makes Retrospective’s take on it unique?
An interviewer once asked Lady Gaga, “If you could do something dangerous just once with no risk what would you do?” She responded without hesitation, “Die… yeah.” Comedy is tricky! And I say this as a writer first and foremost. Comedy must have an element of specificity to be truly funny, but if you want a comedy to be loved by the masses, well, then it has to be broad. Enter Death! Universal appeal with a million theories as to what, why and how it goes. I swear that even for those people who seem so certain about what happens after death, there is this either playful or nervous voice in the back of all of their minds going, “what if…” Retrospective asks audiences to look at the karmic trial of what can happen as a ramification of the mess left over in life. “Hate seems stronger than death,” Clint Belinsky says in the play.
What’s unique for me is that Retrospective takes place in what some may consider purgatory, but is stripped of religious language. It is very ambiguous. And it is this ambiguity that the characters all struggle with.
Retrospective premiered at the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival in New York last year (2025) and is now making its UK premiere at the historic, intimate Barons Court Theatre. How has the show evolved or adapted to fit into a subterranean London fringe space?
There’s definitely been huge changes in the play, both with a slightly shifted script, a new director, and now a new cultural audience. Barons Court Theatre, which I previewed my two-hander play, 2-Faces, at before taking it to Ed Fringe ‘23, presents its own challenges as a three-sided stage with just massive brick pillars. The main thing you have to do here is draw what the actual edge of the stage is, and by that I mean, where the audience can and cannot see you. This creates a sort of two-spot stage, where the main portion is actually a six-sided monster shaped thing, and then a blip of stage on the alley between the house-right audience, which we’ve affectionately named “The Birthing Canal.” I cannot tell you how different it is to perform it here than on an elevated proscenium stage like Off-Broadway in New York. Still, the story is the story! This stage just requires a greater sense of awareness as an actor.
If you woke up in a mysterious gallery trapped with your own life's retrospective, what is one comedic highlight and one "blank canvas" moment you think your guide would force you to confront?
Haha, what a great question. Pass.
How do you mentally and physically prepare for a performance?
Well, I do get nervous, even for like weeks before I start performing or sometimes even rehearsing. I’ll be walking down the street extra-aware of my footing because I, for some reason, feel like I’m suddenly going to break my ankle and not be able to do the show. I’ve never broken a bone in my life. I’ll be cutting a carrot and think, “What if I accidentally cut my entire hand off?!”
On the day is always the biggest thing. Making sure I get enough sleep is where it all starts, eating a good breakfast and then a massive lunch, because you certainly won’t eat dinner before going on stage and you often have too much adrenaline afterwards to feel hungry at all.
I’ll do a vocal warm up and stretch at home, go over the lines that are the tongue-twistery-ist several times, because stuttering on stage is SUCH a bad look. I meditate now as well, because most of it is in the belief that this show tonight is going to go really, really well.
I usually spend the 20 minutes leading up to curtain sweating in the back, applying more makeup than the previous night and questioning whether or not I actually like acting or have just been lying to myself for two decades. Normally the last five minutes before I enter is spent feeling like I have to pee so badly that we’re genuinely going to have a problem. But then, it’s time, and I enter, and it all falls away in the most beautiful way. It’s just me and my castmates there playing with one another.
On a more practical note for all younger actors out there, I do ALWAYS walk the entire stage from edge to edge before curtain every night, I do any very physical parts of the performance a few times so I don’t injure myself while performing, I spend a few minutes building what is beyond the fourth wall so I don’t spend the show avoiding looking out there, and I also take a good few minutes to stand in gratitude to what I’m about to do, because what a beautiful life it truly is, to have people watch me perform and spend my time telling stories.
What was the first piece of theatre that had a big impact on your career?
When I was 8 years old, my school took us to a performing arts middle school to see their play F Is For Freedom, which is about the Underground Railroad in the U.S. I’ll never forget the moment in the show when a little girl came up through a trap door in the stage. I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT! What magic is this!!?! I remember how enthralled I was, completely engaged, how it felt to be lost in and learn from a staged story. I transferred to that school the next year, where I ended up focusing in visual arts, but found my way back to acting in university and the rest is history.
What gives you motivation?
Honestly, having an opportunity is such a big thing in this industry that when I’ve got one, a big part of my motivation comes out of not wanting to suck. When I’m in the proper positive mindset, most of my motivation comes out of the gratitude that this is so much fun and I’m so damn lucky to be able to do it.
If I can’t drive myself from that positive place, or even from that negative place on the day, I drive myself from the place that discipline will set you free and 10-minutes spent on the script is better than none, and normally turns into an hour once you begin anyway, so just get started!
On a practical note, I try to remember that I don’t have to do things “in order” and can do whatever task feels the most accomplishable in my process that day, and if there’s something I’ve been putting off then I’ll have a sit down with my journal and freewrite about why. Normally the thing I need to resolve my procrastination becomes clear there.
Also, bro, you’re gonna die soon…. They might wiley-coyote-anvil me out of here soon and what the freaking heck man, just DO IT. DON’T YOU WANT TO DO IT? DIDN’T YOU SIGN UP FOR THIS!?
How do you reflect on your career journey so far? What have been the standout moments for you?
Listen, I’ve been in this industry for eleven years, and I am not yet famous, and I am not yet rich. (Is this what we’re aiming for? I don’t know... Money would be nice, but not for making nonsense, and fame would be more bad than good I think, but it would mean I could get work with some artists whose work has influenced me since I was a child.) BUT! My life is sustainable, it’s full of collaborative partners, I have goals and time and space to work on my work, not just act in others’ projects, as fulfilling as that can be and honestly, this year especially, it has felt like my career is growing quite rapidly. I’m pleased! I do have like eight jobs and I wish I had, I don’t know… like six? Being an artist is integral to my soul on this earth, and I think I’ll be happy spending my entire life focusing on people and telling our stories and that is what I’m getting to do now, so I’m happy.
My big stand out moments have been performing in work that I’ve also written– 2-Faces here in London and then Ed Fringe ‘23, a short piece I made called Is it so crazy?, my second short film 28 is Great. Also getting to perform the same role for a second production here in Retrospective is absolutely a highlight and I’ve learned SO much. And let’s not forget my principal credit on SNL! Haha. Also, the pilot I finished penning in November, NOT DEAD, is the best thing I’ve ever written and I’m damn proud of it, so if you know any comedy producers, writers, directors… I’m very easy to find online.
What would you hope an audience member takes away from seeing Retrospective?
I hope that people do their homework here on earth, and by that I mean that they take care of their relationships with one another. I hope people take the time they need to reflect on their behavior and what they want to spend their time doing. I hope folks consider what they’re doing with their negativity. And I really hope they remember that as much as everything matters to us now, in the end the only things that will truly matter are what we’ve left behind, be it love or malice.
Retrospective runs at Baron's Court Theatre in London until Saturday 23rd May 2026. For tickets and more information visit https://www.baronscourttheatre.com/retrospective
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